Oh dearie me
I wanted to post this piece from today's Guardian Saturday Review, which appeared in the print version under the heading 'Are Men Bad At Writing Sex', so that I could say, that I was recently flicking through Florence King's He: An Irreverent Look at the American Male (1978) in which she wields a mighty codfish upon the depiction of sex in Bloke Books, and there is certainly gendered form in the matter.
But looking further at that column online, I came across this gem of WTF: 'the cerebral Penguin imprint is not known for fiction, let alone erotic fiction', and larft like drayne.
Okay, I will concede that many people might consider the 'bouts' in Lady Chatterley's Lover do not set fire to their haystacks and may not consider it an erotic work, but if a book is prosecuted for obscenity, it must be considered de jure if not de facto an erotic work, whether or not it is likely to corrupt the innocent reader.
I have a cherished copy in my library of the Trial of Lady Chatterley (1962), in which the editor, CH Rolph commented that, although Penguin Books was the defendant, having sent copies to the DPP in order to provoke a test-case, it was Connie Chatterley who was in the dock.
Penguin also published a number of other works which had either been victims of the obscenity laws (e.g. Ulysses) or had a somewhat raunchy reputation, at least by the standards of the early 60s (The Ginger Man).
Penguin Books may even be fingered for opening the floodgates, though (a historian of censorship writes) that was by no means the last prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2535659.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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